Dogs in Colombia and How It’s Related to Parents Being Banned from Filming Their Own Children in the U.K.

The dogs are more commonly off the leash and roaming free than on it. And you know what’s really interesting? It works. They know not to run into traffic, they come (ruffly) at the time their owners call them, they don’t bite or attack other people or other dogs. It just works.

Why?

Because the people here decided to make it work. They train the animals appropriately and keep an eye on them.

I think this is a symptom of an interesting cultural difference. In the anglosphere (U.S., U.K., Canada, etc.), if one thing goes wrong as a result of a liberty being taken (e.g. allowing dogs not to be leashed), then we jerk our knees and take that liberty away from everyone. In many other cultures, they don’t do that, they have a higher tolerance for “oopsies”. One dog getting run over or biting someone here isn’t going to result in the sudden strict enforcement of leash laws, the liberty to have your dog unleashed in public being taken away from everyone, and it shouldn’t.

Did you know that in the U.K. you are not allowed to film children in a school or sports event unless you get the permission of every, single parent there? That just seems insane to me. One pedophile filmed some kids and used it for jerk-off material, they got caught and so people found out about it, and now everyone is banned from filming kids in public. It’s completely unjustified.

The spread of photo bans is not really a response to child abusers stalking school sports days. Instead, it reflects the contamination of everyday adult-child relations – and the new assumption, as the children’s author Philip Pullman put it, that “the default position of one human being to another is predatory rather than kindness”. Any adult looking through the viewfinder at a child is viewed as potentially sinister and in need of regulation.

Of course, none of these restrictions would stop a paedophile getting hold of images of children; and apart from anything else it would be easy enough to pay £12 for a school nativity DVD or, indeed, register their camera.

It is not the child abuser but the loving parent who suffers from these rules. “You miss out on the milestones in your child’s life,” says Sue Rice. “It is a shame because they are small for such a short time.”

Source (The Guardian). I recommend you read that article as it contains more information on the ban, which isn’t actually based in law at all but is a common consensus of policies at schools throughout the U.K….though they frequently lie and say they have to it because it is the law.

Or, even worse…no pedophile ever did this, but people came up with the scenario in their ignorant imaginations and, being ignorant and easily scared, decided this non-existant (and probably-never-will-exist) threat needed to be dealt with. This is not at all uncommon and I’ve seen it done time and again in the U.S.

Can you think of any examples of this in your home country? Do you believe your country is too strict or too loose about such things?